Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
guide into magazines, mailings and retail products (ranging from wine bottle neck
labels to DVDs) of either conservation organisations or businesses. This can create a
major short-term increase in distribution as hundreds of thousands or even millions
of pocket guides are inserted into the relevant product. In addition, we require the
partners to include an accompanying article or information about why sustainable
seafood choices are important, and where to learn more. For example, millions
of 2007 national pocket guides were inserted into the DVDs of the Warner Bros.
Studios animated movie hit 'Happy Feet'. The DVD starts with a trailer about the
impact of fishing activities on the environment and what consumers can do to help -
leading into the use of the Seafood Watch pocket guide.
Such opportunities have more than doubled the total distribution to more than
20 million pocket guides across the United States. The significance of increased
pocket guide distribution is that consumers are continually exposed to the sustain-
able seafood message and provided with a tool for action. Whether they read about
it in the newspaper, watch a documentary or get an updated pocket guide in the
latest edition of their favourite magazine, we are maintaining issue salience and
driving a consumer demand that major businesses are paying attention to.
In addition to distributing hard copies of the pocket guides, almost 700 000 pocket
guides have been downloaded from our website. Every seafood recommendation
on the pocket guide is supported by an online fact sheet (accessed by a search-
able database) and a detailed, downloadable, fully referenced, externally reviewed
seafood report.
17.6
Developing regional seafood recommendations
The Seafood Watch programme's success in building partnerships and distributing
pocket guides is the result of 6 years of intense and focused development, and the
early decision was made to create seafood recommendations that were regional in
scope and dynamic in nature. After publishing our first pocket guide in 2000, our
colleagues in both the Monterey area and abroad felt that our recommendations
needed to recognise the positive efforts of specific sectors of a fishery, even if they
were only a subset of a larger fishery. Others were concerned that consumers would
not be able to identify seafood that was taken with specific low-impact gear types,
or that their seafood purveyor would not know the country or state of origin or
whether the product was farmed or wild-caught. Seafood Watch saw this as an
opportunity to create a marketplace demand not only for sustainable seafood but
also for better labelling and information about seafood sources. The regionally
specific pocket guides were developed to make recommendations about the most
common and popular seafood items, and also to tempt the consumer's palate to
explore and support regional, and sometimes relatively unknown, seafood items,
thereby creating an expanded marketplace for developing sustainable fisheries and
fish farms.
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